Tuesday, January 22, 2008

RSS can beat YOUR SS

I'm sorry to disappoint all of you Princess Bride fans out there, but the fact is RSS does NOT stand for Rodents of Substandard Size. But then, to quote Princess Bride once again, Get used to disappointment. ;)

No, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a tool that is widely becoming more popular and more used. It's almost, sort of, not exactly, but pretty much like TiVo for your television. Instead of having to scour the TV Guide and set up your timer for each program that you want to catch, you just tell your TiVo the name of the program that you want to watch, and it records it for you whenever that show comes on. If the show doesn't come on, nothing gets taped. If the sci-fi channel shows a New Year's Day marathon, every episode gets taped.

RSS serves a similar purpose for the Internet community. Instead of hopping from one blog to the next, taking a peek in the hopes that something new has been posted, all you have to do is subscribe to that blog's RSS feed. Then whenever new content is published to that blog, you're feed reader is automatically updated and notifies you (boop-boop TiVo sound effect not included).

Joel, over at So You Want to Teach? has done an excellent job of promoting his RSS feed and explaining it in a way that everyone can understand it. I have attempted to explain it, but you might want to check out his version all the same.

So why am I even talking about RSS feeds, TiVo, and the sci-fi channel? Well because I want more subscribers, of course! Those of you who are regular readers of Learn Me Good, I certainly appreciate your business, and I hope that you keep coming back. I know there are some times, though, that I go for days without making a post. Subscribing to the Learn Me Good feed would keep you updated on when I've posted something new. Since many of you are already subscribers, I'll even go one step farther and make a request. I would be eternally grateful if you could think of just one person that you could recommend Learn Me Good to as a new subscriber. Just think about all of the fun conversations you could have over lunch! Who will Kate choose on Lost? What will Simon's next snarky comment be on American Idol? Can you believe what Mister Teacher said yesterday on Learn Me Good?

And for those of you who are new or visiting here at Learn Me Good, why not give me a chance to win you over? Put me into your feed reader and read a few posts. I guarantee, if your acne hasn't cleared up after three weeks, I'll give you your money back.

2 comments:

Outstanding. Thanks for sending people my way. Be on the lookout for an awesome Top 10 list coming this Friday over at So You Want To Teach?. It was written by a certain snarky third grade teacher named Mister.

If it wasn't for RSS and feed readers, I wouldn't be able to keep up with 1/10th of the blogs that I'd like to read. Feedburner has been excellent for keeping track of my own site, too. Paired with Google Analytics, it's pretty powerful.